Sarah Palin: Obama’s Predictable, Tiring, Ineffective Lecture

Congress’ approval rating is at 11% because politicians thwart the will of the people, explode our national debt, and practice reckless deficit spending while hoping we’ll sit down and shut up about their nonsensical agenda. President Obama just made the AFL-CIO suffer through another “Blame Bush” lecture today as he, as usual, put the car in reverse and looked backward to find someone else to blame for problems he helped cause and now aggressively perpetuates.

Okay, Mr. President, you tell us we have to keep looking backward (as we’re steered toward the cliff), so let’s go: Barack Obama was part of the problem while in Congress. Senator Obama pushed the fiscally irresponsible measures that Democrats, who held the majority, advanced while holding the government’s purse strings. And now, as President, he’s not just one of the pack anymore as a mere contributor to the problem – he now leads the problem. We are sick and tired of President Obama pointing his finger and screeching through his blame game about what he “inherited.” Up until 18 months ago he was fully engaged in that Congressional herd mentality of the Left as he just went with the flow, adding to the debt and deficit, instead of bucking his party’s leadership to stop the recklessness. (Did you ever hear him as an independent voice standing up and speaking out against his Democrat party’s overspending and over reach? Come to think of it, did you ever hear of his congressional record at all? For the life of me I can’t think of any time he used his bully pulpit as a sitting U.S. Senator to lead free market, equality-respecting pro-private sector efforts, nor to change up actions he now conveniently condemns. He could have refudiated them all.)

His lecture today must have been tough for our good union brothers and sisters to sit through, though it may have resonated with some union bosses who desire their members to adopt a herd mentality, too, so as to not dare speak up against what Washington is doing to us.

Surely the good, hard working Americans who happen to be union members know, too, that Obama’s blame game is getting old. It’s obviously ineffective, it’s the antithesis of good leadership, and it reeks of hypocrisy. A complicit media won’t call President Obama out on this, so let’s do it ourselves, friends. It helps put his criticisms and fiscal problems in context.

In contrast to President Obama’s lack of leadership in getting our country on a responsible fiscal path, there are some who have a positive agenda, including Rep. Paul Ryan who has shared ideas that deserve a fair hearing. He knows why we need to rein in the government’s reckless spending and how it can be done. Please read this excerpt of an article by Rep. Ryan and be thankful there are some who remember why they were hired to serve us in Congress – it sure wasn’t to merely vote “present” as the powers-that-be jam the car in reverse while hoping we won’t remember who dug the ditch we’re headed toward.

“Reducing deficits should begin with a budget plan to cut spending, yet incredibly Congress abandoned its legal obligation to write a budget this year, which means the leadership has abandoned even the pretense of limiting government’s insatiable spending appetite. I hope the Debt Commission, of which I am a member, will identify potential major spending reductions when we publish our report in December. But waiting for somebody else to suggest cuts was no excuse for Congress to dismiss its mandate to write America’s budget. There’s no shortage of ideas for cuts we could make immediately. Last year I identified $4.8 trillion we could cut. Right now we could easily reduce spending by $1.3 trillion by: rescinding $266 billion in unused stimulus funds and another $16 billion in leftover TARP money; saving $925 billion by cutting and capping discretionary spending at 2008 levels; imposing a hiring and pay freeze on government employees, saving $65 billion; and reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the proximate originators of the home mortgage meltdown, to save $30 billion. I would also give the President line-item veto authority to realize further savings. The American people and both parties see the need to get federal spending under control. Any time congressional leaders want, we can start by cutting unnecessary expenditures. Let’s not punish business and workers by raising their taxes at a time when the economy is struggling to return to a growth path—that would only make a desperate situation worse.”

Rep. Ryan is right about not raising taxes.

Lest we forget, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Democrats have a special New Years gift in store for American taxpayers. On January 1, 2011, they are going to hit us with the largest tax increase in U.S. history. By allowing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire on New Years Eve, the Democrats are going to impose a $3.8 trillion tax increase on Americans over the next decade.

Instead of admitting that this massive tax hike is just an attempt to get hardworking taxpayers to continue to fund their reckless spending, the Democrats are selling it is as a tax on “the rich” to increase revenues to pay down the debt. However, history shows that raising the top tax rate doesn’t lead to increased revenues. It’s what Arthur Laffer describes as a tax the rich Catch-22: the highest earners, who are expected to bear most of the tax burden, generally also have the best tax advisers to help them get around it.

Regardless of what the Democrats want you to believe, this is a tax increase on every American who pays taxes. Families will suffer because the Democrats’ tax hike will reinstate the marriage penalty, cut the child tax credit in half, abolish various personal exemptions, and impose limits on itemized deductions like home mortgage interest and charitable contributions. Investors and savers would suffer through increases in the top rates in long-term capital gains and qualified dividends. And the Alternative Minimum Tax would end up hitting 15 million taxpayers – up from 4 million in 2009.

We’ll all be feeling the pinch, but the ones who will be hit hardest by this massive tax hike will be America’s small business owners – the businesses that create up to 70% of all jobs in this country. According to a recent report by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, small business owners will pay over half the taxes raised when the Democrats increase the top two tax brackets. In an already anemic jobless recovery, the last thing government should do is to impose even higher tax burdens on job creators. Instead of hurting “the rich,” such measures would end up hurting the unemployed.

To burden American families and small businesses with the largest tax hike in history while the economy is teetering on the brink of a potential double-dip recession is madness. It’s another reason why we must elect commonsense fiscal conservatives in the upcoming midterm elections this November. We simply cannot afford the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Democrats. We need people in Congress who know that the best way to get our economy moving again is to cut taxes, not raise them by unprecedented amounts.

You might have noticed that the Democrats have been throwing around the phrase “common sense” more often these days, but actions speak louder than words. We need real leadership in Washington across the board. We need common sense solutions, not finger-pointing, buck-passing, and lecturing.

Usually, I find myself agreeing, but as soon as people start mentioning Laffer, the most ineffective, widely-discredited, and useless economist of all time, who was fired from the Reagan administration for exactly those reasons, you’ve lost me. Unfortunately, it is historical fact that the eras of highest economic prosperity have been when taxes have been the highest, and that tax cuts often herald the beginning of recessions, and even depressions. The question is how do you balance that fact with a desire to limit taxes? And no one seems to have come up with that answer yet.